The Case Against Bleak House

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[rufustfirefly]

I agree with most of this well thought out post. I knew there was a reason i could never really get in to this book. I much prefer many of Dickens other novels. great expectations has always been my favorite.

[Charles Darnay]

The one issue I will pick with you is.....Nell a bland character? What? You are not familiar with the picaresque/sentimental tradition it would. Nell is one not defined more by those who act upon her rather than how she acts.

Much can be said about Esther There are Dickens' protagonists who are "the heroes of [their lives]" and then there are those who are set up as a mirror. Pip, Copperfield, Oliver - these are the heroes. But not all Dickens' novels focus on the hero (Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities (sort of) ).

Bleak House is not my favourite, but I do like it. I agree with some of your points, mainly that there is not the depth of character that you find in some of his other works. Yet there is a realism (combustion aside) to them that you don't find in other works.

I do think BH serves as a critique of the legal system. Even if the court proper is not present all that often, it exists throughout - and we are not seeing into the court but rather the tentacles of that octopus JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE - those affected by the bureaucratic nature of Chancery

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[Charles Darnay]

[QUOTE=Ragnar Freund;1097184]Sorry, I can't make anything of the last two sentences. To me, Nell was the least memorable character of Old Curiosity Shop.
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing. - Oscar Wilde

Wow....serious typos on my part, sorry.

My point was that Nell is part of a tradition of sentimental literature. She is meant to inspire pity/pathos - as sentimental lit. often does.

[Climacus]

Bleak House is one of my least favourite Dickens novels too, though I'm not entirely sure why. Critics laud it at least partly because of its structural coherence. It doesn't have the wandering here-there-everywhere quality that many Dickens novels have. But I like the here-there-everywhere quality. So, BH feels un-Dickensian, to me anyway. About your first three points, I'm not sure. (I haven't read the novel in awhile.) As for point four, I don't read novels for social criticism as such - if they happen to including penetrating critiques, fine; if not, fine too. But I definitely agree with point five. I was absolutely nonplussed.

[JBI]

Meh, it's a funny novel, which I think is the point. Say what anyone will, Dicken's wrote more to be enjoyable than anything else, and I think his nice mix of rough language with a heightened ironic tone gives a fair bit of delight. One need not bother just looking for things to rant about, the book is meant to be enjoyable, and needing a "case" for or against something defeats the purpose of reading for the sake of enjoying the text.

[dfloyd]

What do you think happened to Andy Warhol and Truman Capote?

[LookStranger]

Although I wouldn't consider 'Bleak House' Dickens' best novel, it does deserve a defence against some of the OP's criticisms.

1) You mention a few of the novel's less well-developed characters, but what about Mr. Tulkinghorn, Skimpole, Jarndyce and the Dedlocks? One of Dickens' great talents as a novelist was to give us a glimpse of a real personality, even in the characters that are not central to the movement of the plot: his world is a real one. Even the people that play a peripheral role in your life are central in their own, so the 'potential' you see is Dickens hinting at rich, full lives that cannot be fully explored without harming the development of the plot.

2) As has been touched on above, Esther is not a real 'protagonist'. She is a lens through which the reader views the events, and it is only at the end that we see where she fits in with the secrets of the plot. The protagonist is supposed to make things happen, as Pip or David Copperfield does: things happen to Esther, often things that she tried to discourage, such as Richard's interest in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

3) I don't personally believe that Dickens intended the end to come as a shock: in fact, most similar cases around the time ended when the estate was consumed in lawyers' fees. What Dickens does is get the reader emotionally involved with the human cost of the bureaucracy that he was satirising.

4) The court proceedings aren't shown to us very often for a reason: the satire is against the opacity of the courts, and the fact that the key facts of the case are hidden from the people whom it concerns most is an important part of this. The social criticism in 'Hard Times' is markedly less subtle.

5) I think 'lazy' is unfair. At the time, it was a controversial phenomenon that Dickens had been convinced of from reports he'd read, and was eager to introduce to his wide readership. Also, Stephen King writes in an age when SHC has been investigated and largely discredited. However, the unexplained deaths that were attributed to SHC remain mysterious: the best explanation is that a spark from a fire or other source lit the person's clothes. Therefore, although the explanation might be scientifically wrong, it's not as if he was killing a character in an impossible way.

The novel has many other merits that have been overlooked. In its first page, the description of London is wonderfully atmospheric, and there are hundreds of reasons that it has been a highly popular novel for well over a century. I don't go in for literary ranking, but I'd say 'Bleak House' is a fine novel that deserves its place as one of Dickens' most highly esteemed works.

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[kiki1982]

As far as I can see - and what I am going to say will sound very harsh, but to me it is true - it is the comment of an ignorant person on a process he does not comprehend.

As two contradicting wills were made, obviously without grounds to suspect that the latter one (if there was a date on it at all, probably not) revoked the earlier one, as a lawyer you may be as good-natured as you like, you will not be able to do justice by one or the other party. Which one is the right one?

The Chancery has no business either because they could only impose specific performance, injuction or damages. Firstly to what party and secondly what? There is no case, as it were, of one party not wishing to indulge the other although they have a contract that stipulates one party must.

That is unfortunate, but it is true. If people then want to continue through the court, that is their own problem, but it is not the court's responsibility.

Several analyses have been made about Jarndyce and Jarndyce alluding to the Thellusson case in which the heirs were those alive after the death of the last of Thellusson's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren alive upon his own death. You can imagine what a tricky business this was without computers. That is asking for trouble. Such cases nowadays can still take several years to conclude. Just imagine it without actual digitalised databases. It is practically undoable.

And every time someone dies or is born, the whole thing starts again, because before you execute a will, the heirs must be defined, and the longer the thing goes on, the more possible heirs arise (certainly in the 19th century).

When Dickens comments on the absolute duration of such a case, he clearly discounts real problems and clearly also prefers to ignore the problem which he hasn't defined in the first place.

In terms of work houses he was maybe right in certain cases that the manager sometimes lived on the grant and spent less on his inmates than was intended (although there were plenty of others who did not), and that maybe the workhouse in itself was not the best way to tackle things, but in this case he was clearly aiming above his comprehension. He may have witnessed such court cases, but he clearly did not have the comprehension of Kafka in terms of systems.

It's a little bit similar as the recent BBC comment on custody laws in Garrow's Law, really. 'He stole my son!' No, Hill didn't. He just kept what was his due, as unfair as the law may have been from our point of view.

Sorry, rant over. :biggrinjester: